Contextualizing the topos of the neglected child within a variety of discourses, this book challenges the assumption that the early nineteenth century witnessed a clear transition from a Puritan to a liberating approach to children and demonstrates that oppressive assumptions survive in major texts considered part of the Romantic cult of childhood.

Concepts of childhood and adult responsibility: Locke, Rousseau, More, and Edgeworth
Redeeming or silencing the child's voice: Blake and Wordsworth
Child neglect as social vice: Trollope, Tonna, and working-class subjectivity
The split image of the neglected child: Dickens
Aged children and the inevitability of being neglected: Hardy.

Galia Benziman is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Open University of Israel and specializes in British Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century. Formerly a Fulbright and Dan David Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of California Dickens Project, USA.

What is the connection between law and justice in the literature of the Ancient Near East? Does justice always need the writing of laws? And what is the true purpose of the law collections of the Ancient Near East and of the Bible? To take the case of the Hammurapi code, does it represent an authentic legal text, or a work of royal propaganda, or rather a collection of case laws?

The volume edited by Olivier Artus gathers together conferences given on the occasion of two international colloques at the Catholic University of Paris (2010 and 2011) about this field of law and justice. The articles lead an investigation about the questions concerned from the legal texts of the Ancient Near East, particularly from the Mesopotamian literature, and from the biblical legal texts, as well as from the wisdom biblical literature. The different studies try to set the legal texts in their historical situation and in the context of the political and theological debates of their time.

The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civil and criminal trials? This book takes up the diversity and complexity of these idiosyncratic and, in strict terms, generally extra-legal medial situations. Drawing on a fascinating diversity of public trials and filmic responses, from the Trial of the Gang of Four to the Gacaca local courts of Rwanda to the filmic symbolism of 9-11, from Soviet era show trials to Nazi People's Courts leading international scholars address the theatrical, political, filmic and symbolic importance of show trials in making history, legitimating regimes and, most surprising of all, in attempting to heal trauma through law and through film. These essays will be of considerable interest to those working on international criminal law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and the relationship between law and film.

Contents

Introduction/ Christian Delage and Peter Goodrich

Part 1 History, trauma, war crimes

1.`Historical trials': getting the past right-or the future? / Pieter Lagrou
2.Building the narrative: the UN Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone / William A. Schabas
3.Competitive narratives: an incident at the Papon trial / Henry Rousso
4.Gacaca courts in Rwanda: a local justice for a local genocide history? / Helene Dumas

9.The psychological evaluation of Duch, a criminal against humanity in Cambodia / Francoise Sironi
10.Pleading guilty before the international criminal courts: the case of Duch before the Khmer Rouge tribunal / Francois Roux
11.The place and participation of the victims in Duch's trial / Brice Poirier

Christian Delage is a professor at the University of Paris 8. He also teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and at Sciences Po Paris, and is a regular professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law, New York. He has authored ten books on legal theory, psychoanalysis, law and the visual.

The statement, "The Civil Rights Movement changed America," though true, has become something of a cliché. Civil rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer's "The White Negro" to Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" to Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy.

By examining these works closely, Gray posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring but did so in ways that--intentionally or not--often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally nave. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought occurring at the same time.

Jean-Michel Frodon (ed.)Cinema and the ShoahAn Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth CenturyAnna Harrison & Tom Mes (trans.) State University of New York Press, New Yok, 2010, 415 pp.ISBN: 9781438430270

From The Great Dictator to Schindler’s List, the extermination of the Jews of Europe has driven the cinema, more than any other form of artistic expression, to question its methods, techniques, and ethics. It is with reference to the Shoah that a decisive part of the thought behind modern cinema has been constructed, and, consciously or not, many of the greatest films of the past sixty years bear the mark of this event. To give an account of these phenomena, Cinema and the Shoah brings together filmmakers, historians, journalists, philosophers, and researchers to explore how the Shoah, as a historical event, implicated and mobilized the cinema by profoundly questioning its modes of recounting and storytelling, of putting visions onscreen. The book also includes a filmography (compiled with the assistance of the Fritz Bauer Institute of Frankfurt) that lists over three hundred feature-length films, short films, and documentaries about the Shoah, produced between 1945 and the present.

Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. Its three-part history traces the popularization of the 'criminal beast' metaphor in late sixteenth-century England, the troubling of the trope during the long eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century discovery of criminal atavism. With chapters on rogue pamphlets, Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Defoe and Swift, Godwin, Dickens, and Lombroso, the book illustrates how ideologically inscribed metaphors foster transfers between law, penal practices, and literature. Criminals as Animals concludes that criminal-animal metaphors continue to negatively influence the treatment of prisoners, suspected terrorists, and the poor even

Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations

1 Introduction: Tracing the History of the Criminal-Animal Metaphor

Part I: Creating ‘Criminal Beasts’ in Early Modern Literature and Law
2 Catching Conies with Thomas Harman,
Robert Greene, and Thomas Dekker
3 Richard III’s Animalistic Criminal Body
4 Of a Howling Murderer – The Duke of Malfi
5 Ben Jonson’s Comedies of Gulling Rogues

Part II: Humanizing Animals and ‘Animalizing’ the Lower Orders
during the Long Eighteenth Century
Introduction to Part II: Eighteenth-Century Changes
in the Criminal-Animal Trope
6 Colonialism and the ‘Criminal Beast’
in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels
7 William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty – Sympathizing
with Animals and Denigrating the Lower Orders as Beasts
8 The Prisoner as Suffering Animal – Caleb Williams’s Revision
of the Criminal-Animal Metaphor

Part III: Reinstating the ‘Criminal Beast’ during the Nineteenth Century
Introduction to Part III: The Nineteenth Century’s Delineation
of the Criminal Class
9 Charles Dickens’s Contradictions
10 The Criminal-Animal Metaphor and Lombrosian Criminology
11 Coda
Bibliography
Index

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Why are civil authorities in so-called liberal democracies affronted by public nudity and the Islamic full-face ‘veil’? Why is law and civil order so closely associated with robes, gowns, suits, wigs and uniforms? Why is law so concerned with the ‘evident’ and the need for justice to be ‘seen’ to be done? Why do we dress and obey dress codes at all? In this, the first ever study devoted to the many deep cultural connections between dress and law, the author addresses these questions and more. His responses flow from the radical thesis that ‘law is dress and dress is law’.

Engaging with sources from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Carlyle, Dickens and Damien Hirst, Professor Watt draws a revealing history of dress and civil order and offers challenging conclusions about the nature of truth and the potential for individuals to fit within the forms of civil life.

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword

Author’s Preface

Chapter One: ‘Dress is Law’

Chapter Two: ‘Foundations of the State of Dress’

Chapter Three: ‘Shakespeare on Proof and Fabricated Truth’

Chapter Four: ‘The Face the Law Makes’

Chapter Five: ‘Addressing the Naked and Unfolding the Veil’

Chapter Six: ‘Something More Comfortable: A Fitting Conclusion’

Gary Watt is Professor of Law at the University of Warwick, UK. He is a National Teaching Fellow and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2009 he was named national 'Law Teacher of the Year'. He is the founding co-editor of the journal Law and Humanities and his previous books include Trusts and Equity (Oxford University Press, London, 2003, 588 pp. ISBN: 978-0198700616;5ª ed., 2012, 640 pp.) and Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond Law (Hart Publishing, London, 2009, 320 pp., ISBN: 9781841138466).

Monday, December 16, 2013

German Text Crimes offers new perspectives on scandals and legal actions implicating writers of German literature since the 1950s. Topics range from literary echoes of the "Heidegger Affair" to recent incitements to murder businessmen (agents of American neo-liberal power) in works by Rolf Hochhuth and others. GDR songwriters' cat-and-mouse games with the Stasi; feminist debates on pornography, around works by Charlotte Roche and Elfriede Jelinek; controversies over anti-Semitism, around Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser/ The Reader and Martin Walser's lampooning of the Jewish critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki; Peter Handke's pro-Serbian travelogue; the disputed editing of Ingeborg Bachmann's "Nachlass"; vexed relations between dramatists and directors; (ab)uses of privacy law to 'censor' contemporary fiction: these are among the cases of 'text crimes' discussed. Not all involve codified law, but all test relations between state power, civil society, media industries and artistic license